Serious international researchers into the health effects of alcohol have uncompromisingly slammed a recent call by British trick-cyclists for severe restrictions on drinking by elderly people.
A report issued earlier this month by the Royal College of Psychiatrists described elderly (over-65) drinkers as society's "invisible …

... but ...

Playing Satan's solicitor, and having not read either paper, I am perhaps overqualified to pontificate on this. Presumably the shrinks' paper looked at alcohol and the elderly from a psychological point of view and the biologists looked at the physical aspect, hence two conflicting results.

Now that's a job I fancy

What the hell.

I'm quite looking forward to getting to the age where I can do anything I like, and it can't really knock much off my life expectancy. We're all going to die: might as well go out with a smile on your face. Cheers!

Age is relative ...

Must tell my parents....

Have to wait till they sober up though.

In other news, once knew a doctor who planned to take up smoking when he retired, as he knew it wouldn't have time to kill him before he died of old age. He wasn't expecting the stroke that killed him 18 months after he retired though.

I for one

I'll drink to that

Having recently reached my mid fifties, I can assure you that I have no intention of spending my declining years propped up in an oversized chair in the St Peter's Close Home for the Terminally Bewildered.

I intend instead to grow old disgracefully. I have my obituary ready:

"Passed away aged 110 ... shot dead by an enraged husband. He spent 90% of his money on beer, women and roller-coasters. The rest he just frittered away."

Surely

Given the state of the economy don't we want elderly people to die swiftly and cheaply? Unless the medical profession has a legal solution to this conundrum they should just shut the hell up. I mean, what are we paying them for?

a rock and a hard place

Having worked with psychiatrists for 20 years of my working life until they destroyed it in a clash of opinions about a scientific issue, I am torn:

I can appreciate why the report might be flawed, bad science and overly restricted in what it considered: such things were the constant areas on which I am the psychiatrists always disagreed, me using rational argument to try to persuade them; and they using personalized comments (like "too much of a perfectionist" and "not prepared to fully understand the complexity of what we have to deal with here") in an attempt to disregard what I was saying.

On the other hand, I am sure the evaluations of the report might suffer from the twin problems of the extent to which ordinary language is used in novel and specialized ways within psychiatry, and the ways in which technical language has moved into everyday language and is misused and misunderstood. This is on top of the possible different focus of attention of the two sides: one on psychiatric issues, the other on biological issues.

However, given my experiences and my knowledge of the manner in which a lot of reports typically get generated from within psychiatry, my gut-feeling is that if I had to choose one, the critiques of the psychiatry report would be the ones to pick. Of course, a detailed study of both the report and its criticisms would be required to get a more accurate view, and then my experience tells me that any conclusions critical of the psychiatrists would, once again, be subject to responses like "too perfectionist", "done from positions of ignorance", "we are the experts in psychiatry here, so shut up", and similar.

The whole of the way psychiatry is organised both as a *profession" and as a system of enquiry that calls itself a science, leaves much to be desired. Because of its over-emphasis on professional importance and authority figures, its bases, which are often built on shifting sand, allow all sorts of "research conclusions" to be drawn and elevated into far more than they deserve. It is a potentially useful, yet dangerous, area of enquiry, crippled by the professional bodies and thought processes of the people that have claimed it.